In an article on Gabriel Marcel,¹ written some twelve years ago, Professor Hocking begins by putting an interesting question. He refers to Marcel's objection that those who have tried to expound his thought "have often yielded to the temptation of systematizing it." But is this a temptation, asks Professor Hocking, or "something of a necessity?" He notes that, in Marcel's view, "the yen for system is, we might say, a professional disease of the thinker, who for his own comfort requires to consider the world a rounded-in totality, justifying a thought-picture having the same inner unity and completeness."²